What I Use Instead of Google

Saying folks that are privacy conscious 'deluded' is a bit of a stretch as well as assuming their reasons for deciding.

You list a bunch of services Google provide for that $5 and yes, no doubt you can extract good value if you want to use all those things, and also don't mind relinquishing privacy for the content you choose to put on there. FWIW Gsuite is more like $7/m where I am.

For me personally, you can list those bunch of things and gmail is the only really useful, day to day tool - mainly because their spam filtering is better than most. Essentially that's where the only value is, for me.

Also bear in mind Google's history of retiring products, hardly 'iron clad' reliability.

For me, their lack of privacy ethos compounds the problem of them having a monopoly on search, and to a large extent information discovery. That, alongside their huge reach in how they can gather information on people to aid advertising, via Chrome, Android, DNS, analytics... that huge list. Sleep walking into a society where a handful of large corps know everything about you isn't necessary.

> Moving to Apple Maps is basically stabbing yourself in the face.

After doing some basic A/B testing (checking Google Maps, Waze and Apple Maps for routing guidance) and establishing that Apple Maps has been giving me earlier arrival times through different routing guidance (and actually delivering on that earlier arrival time, by means of actually using it), I've determined that's less likely to be true, if you're in a city that has been refreshed recently.

Combined with the (potentially anti-competitive) use of private APIs on both the iPhone and Apple Watch, enabling the phone lockscreen to always display routing guidance, and the watch to provide haptic feedback for routing guidance, Apple Maps has become a superior experience as far as driving goes.

This is all if you're already a sucker in their eco-system, and happen to live in a city they care about, which I am.

EDIT: At the same time..

> Moving to Apple Maps is basically stabbing yourself in the face.

If you're taking this from the perspective of moving from one megacorp to another, rather than quality of service, then yes, there's basically no difference here. Apple today is claiming to care, in a similar manner to Google's old mission statement of "dont be evil". Apple have been pretty clear that their interest in your privacy only extends as far as lip service goes, given the lack of E2E encryption on iCloud storage for the majority of your data.

2 decades ago Google was "don't be evil" and here we are today. Where do we think Apple will be in a decade or two from now?

So yes, in that respect, don't stab yourself in the face, and don't use any megacorp products.

Office 365 (or Microsoft 365 or whatever they want to call it today) is also good value. ~$5/month gives you more or less the same as Google where it comes to email/calendar and 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage. It can go even cheaper at ~$2/month for just basic email (on the "Kiosk" plan) if you don't need cloud storage and just need hosted e-mail.

Regarding your counterpoint, I disagree. It's not about ProtonMail claims of encryption or security or anything, it's just that their business model is to be selling hosted e-mail services and not advertising, and they have no incentive (nor the technical expertise in-house) to read your e-mails for advertising purposes. Furthermore, ProtonMail and all these other services only get a part of your data, so even if they do use your data nefariously, it's better for each one to misuse a separate chunk of it than for one entity to have all of it.

> it's just that their business model is to be selling hosted e-mail services

Does anyone know if pro/business accounts with Google GSuite have better privacy than free accounts?

Another counterpoint to my original post is - you can call someone at ProtonMail, can't do that with Google.

Or people are just sick of being shown ads on everything Google. Sure $5 you get X, Y, Z but you also get 000's of ads pumped at you constantly. Even though you pay for that access you are pretty much opening up all of your inboxes etc for crawlers to scan for your likes, dislikes etc.